Monthly Archives: March 2012

Post navigation

I’ve been reading through the Marvel Comics series Star Wars recently, after hearing about them on Grognardia (although I actually got a few of them when they first came out in the 70s and 80s).

They’re strangely enjoyable, even though the artwork can be a bit amateurish (and the dialogue is often very stilted).

This post is about issue 53. The story begins with Princess Leia crash-landing on a new planet. Characters do this a few times in the series. It’s a good way to have new stories that don’t have to interact with the main setting. I seem to remember the original Battlestar Galactica did the same thing.

Then she discovers these guys:

The plot (which goes over two issues) doesn’t have very much to do with John Carter, but for some reason I enjoyed this pastiche, whereas I really didn’t like the Magnificent Seven story earlier in the series. Perhaps the Don Quixote character and the talking green rabbit were a bit too much. I do think it’s appropriate that Princess Leia ends up in the planetary romance and Han Solo ends up in the Western.

It is said in Teleleli and the lands around that parrots only learn the speech of humans because they are terrified that a language may die out. They are said to prefer to speak in truly dead languages. Alas, this means that they often unintentionally recite the lost knowledge of sorcerers long since perished from their wickedness, with terrible results.

For this reason it is forbidden in most places for wizards to own parrots, but they often do, their love of their own voice extending even to hearing it spoken by another.

The eagles of the lands around Teleleli are said to have flown down from the sun. They present their chicks to the sun, and any that look away they throw from the nest and will not acknowledge. However another bird, called a coot, will take the abandoned chicks in and raise them as their own.